Cecil Travis, 93, All-Star Infielder and a Top Hitter in the 1930s, Is Dead

Cecil Travis, a Washington Senators infielder who was one of baseball’s leading hitters of the 1930s and early ’40s, died Saturday in Riverdale, Ga. He was 93.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son Mike.

A left-handed line-drive hitter, Travis batted over .300 in seven of his first eight full seasons and was a three-time All-Star. He is among 27 players who are candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame in balloting by the Veterans Committee in February.

The summer of 1941 is remembered for Ted Williams hitting .406 — the last batter to break the .400 mark — and for Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak of 56 consecutive games. But Travis, the Senators’ shortstop, had a major league-leading 218 hits that year, and he was runner-up to Williams in the American League batting race, hitting .359 to DiMaggio’s .357.

“It was almost a dream year, but I knew all season I was on borrowed time," Travis once told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Photo

Cecil Travis in the late 1930s.Credit
The New York Times

World War II soon stripped baseball of its top players. Travis entered the Army early in 1942, incurred frozen feet in Europe during the winter of 1944-45 while in the special services branch and did not return to the Senators until the final weeks of the 1945 season. He never regained his pre-war form.

“Everybody thought it was my feet, but they were fine,” he once told The Washington Times. “But my timing was completely gone.”

Travis retired after the 1947 season with 1,544 hits and a career batting average of .314.

Growing up on a farm in Riverdale, near Atlanta, Travis practiced hitting by swinging at rocks with a hoe. He made a remarkable major league debut on May 16, 1933, when the Senators played the Cleveland Indians at Washington’s Griffith Stadium. After an all-night train ride from his Chattanooga, Tenn., farm team, and while nursing a spike wound on a finger, he singled in his first five at-bats of an extra-inning game. The Hall of Famer Fred Clarke, playing with Louisville of the National League in 1894, is the only other player in major league history with a five-hit debut, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

Travis played mostly at shortstop but also at third base in his 12 seasons with the Senators. After his playing days, he scouted for them.

In addition to his son Mike, Travis is survived by his son Ricky, both of Riverdale; three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. His wife, Helen, died in 2004.

Travis said he was not disappointed that World War II military service interrupted a presumed Hall of Fame career. “It never came across my mind and it doesn’t today,” he told The Journal-Constitution. He might have duplicated his brilliant 1941 season, but, as he put it, “You don’t know what you would have had.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A37 of the New York edition with the headline: Cecil Travis, 93, All-Star Infielder And a Top Hitter in the 1930s. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe